HPE invests in TruEra for AI explainability and quality management

With artificial intelligence (AI)  and machine learning (ML) now serving as key attributes to make IT systems faster, more accurate and beneficial for an enterprise’s bottom line, the importance of transparency in how these components are working also becomes more critical . Why? Biases can creep into AI / ML models just as it does in humans, and when it does, queries can go awry and skewed analytics can cause production results to be incorrect.

Explainable AI is important for trust, compliance and building less-biased AI models. Both customers and regulators want to know more about what’s inside the black box. Most monitoring tools leave blind spots, alerting data analysts to problems but not their causes.

Redwood City, California-based TruEra, which provides a suite of AI quality management tools for managing model performance and explainability, announced today that Hewlett Packard Enterprise has invested in it via Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, HPE’s venture capital program. This extends the $25M Series B round TruEra announced in March.

TruEra allows enterprises to not only have a deeper understanding of their machine-learning models but also to identify the root cause of issues and contextualize them almost instantaneously, Ali Wasti, Managing Director of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, told VentureBeat. The tool, called TruEra Monitoring and based on the company’s AI Quality Platform, looks for AI quality metrics including bias, model stability over time – and which features are causing issues.

“TruEra addresses the next big challenge of AI – the quality challenge,” Wasti said. “TruEra’s solutions help ML teams explain, evaluate and test the performance, risk and responsible AI characteristics of models in the development phase, and then monitor their live use to ensure rapid debugging and optimal ongoing performance.”

How will HPE innovate? 

How does HPE plan to innovate in this space with the investment in TruEra?

“HPE customers are rapidly adopting AI initiatives and are excited about the value that they are already seeing,” Wasti told VentureBeat. “Getting AI model quality and MLops right are key to deploying and scaling machine learning models that capture the full potential of an AI-based solution. TruEra stands out for its deep expertise, differentiated technology, and practical experience, helping companies deliver and monitor AI applications.”

HPE has been adding to its AI offerings recently. In addition to the new partnership with TruEra, the IT giant also provides the following:

• HPE Ezmeral MLOps, an MLops solution that lets users build, train and deploy models with DevOps-like speed and agility to operationalize the machine learning lifecycle and accelerate your workloads;
• HPE InfoSight, which helps users gain a cloud operational experience in managing apps and data from edge to cloud with the industry’s most advanced AI for infrastructure; and 
• The 2021 acquisition of DeterminedAI, with which HPE will combine Determined AI’s innovative open-source AI training platform with its high performance computing solutions to enable machine learning engineers speed time-to-production for AI.

“Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a trusted provider to the enterprise and is known for its capability to ensure that cutting-edge innovation delivers proven results,” TruEra CEO and co-founder Will Uppington said in a media advisory. “We’re looking forward to working closely with the HPE team as partners on customer engagements.”

To date, TruEra has raised more than $45M from investors that include Menlo Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Wing Venture Capital, among others. The technology foundation for the company originated in academic research conducted by TruEra co-founders Anupam Datta and Shayak Sen at Carnegie Mellon University. 

TruEra competitors in the space, according to CBInsights.com, include these companies::

• Fiddler.AI
• Arthur
• Arize
• Credo AI
• Proportunity
• NannyML
• Amplero
• HAL24K